ALL THE KING'S MEN | BARRY ALLEN

01. CAN YOU HOLD ME

❛ chapter one! ❜

one | can you hold me—NF

       Mother had always said that no matter what, we will always get hurt, hurt by people, events or even ourselves and in any possible way there is, so being strong and hold your head high before any bad situation is what one has to do. That's what I've been trying to do my entire life, since tragedy used and still is something that knocks at my door quite often; pain and loss, I should be used to them by now and yet I'm not. I don't think I'll ever be.

       It had felt as if just yesterday I was holding my mother's hand as we stood before my father's casket. Now, just a year later, I stood before a cold steel table with the frigid and lifeless body of the woman I adored. The image of her hair flowing in the wind and that smile of hers contrasting with the gory image my eyes took in in that moment. My father died in one of the many wars my earth was doomed to, a year later, mother was accused of being a spy during her youth—something she quit doing when she met my father. I knew about her past and the things she had done and deep down, I knew something like this would happen, my father did too. She knew they would come for her one day and she told me so to be prepared.

       "Независимо от того, что вы видите, будьте сильными, Виолетта," she had told me; no matter what you see, be strong, Violetta. And so I repeated those words like a mantra every day. At the age of ten, I was recruited to the Prime Academy where they'd train me to become the warrior I had been born to be and just weeks later I was taken to an execution room, when I saw my mother standing there, I knew the time had come. The executioner read her faults and then a few minutes to say goodbye were granted to us, which without a doubt were not enough, "Everything is going to be alright," was the last thing she said.

       One bullet. That's all it took.

      Her warm blood had stained my face, for I was forced to watch the execution just a couple feet from her. Mother had shown me her ways to remain emotionless and strong when that moment came and remain emotionless I did. I would not let them see me break and think I was weak, even if I was crumbling inside. Even if she was just a widowed housewife by then, in her past, she had been a deadly fighter and tactician for none other than the KBG. Me watching her being executed had been a punishment for her and a threat for me, to remind me that even if my father had been an outstanding and respected man, one even considered a war hero and that I was welcomed and accepted in their country, they had control over me and if I dared to disobey or rebel in a similar way, it would be my skull being cracked open by a bullet and my blood staining the pristine white floor the next time.

       I was left alone with my mother's cold corpse in another room for barely ten minutes and in that moment I was happy my father was dead, for he wouldn't stand to see the woman he loved lay still and lifeless on a steel table. I wondered what would have happened if they had decided to flee to any other place but to North America when the rumours of another war was spread throughout Russia. I was just months old by then. A feeling of helplessness obtruded upon my body as I took in the macabre scene before me and held back my emotions. Something changed inside of me that day. I became distant and threw myself into the trainings, becoming the best. Feared by the other in training warriors, ironically, a rebel that would break the rules for fun not caring of the punishment that followed, I had nothing left to lose, they couldn't truly hurt me anymore. I was a rock, unbendable steel that nobody would break.